Tim Dunlop argues that those on the Left who dismiss Bush as a fool are in fact fooling themselves. He says:

“I, for one, can’t come at this sort of assessment. Nor can I accept the milder account that he is a bumbling amateur who just happens to get lucky. Such an argument is expressed here, on Electrolite‘s comments box by Iain Coleman :

I think the fundamental problem is the amateurishness, rather than the dishonesty. Tony Blair’s government has become notorious for spin, media manipulation, and stretching the truth until it snaps. Nonetheless, I trust Blair in matters of war much more than I trust Bush. This is because, whatever his other faults, Blair is a highly able politician who will put a lot of hard graft and determination into achieving his goals. Bush, by contrast, is a lazy amateur with the attention span of a small houseplant. With Blair, there’s always the chance that the foreign policy will be wrong: with Bush, there’s the certainty that it will be half-assed.”

This isn’t quite right, but there’s more to it than Tim is willing to concede. Bush has shown that capacity to push very hard and successfully for particular goals – the tax cut, the overthrow of the Taliban and the invasion of Iraq, but then the attention span problem kicks in. Given the disappearance of the surplus, the tax cut is sustainable only with rigorous restraint in expenditure, but Bush has shown no inclination to fight hard for this. In fact, it’s been pretty much ‘spend and let spend’ with the Democrats getting money for their priorities in return for supporting Bush’s military initiatives. Similarly, the risk that Afghanistan will collapse back into the kind of warlordism that set the stage for the Taliban is growing every day, and the US seems to be willing to accept this rather than anything that might even slightly compromise the operational freedom of its armed forces. Finally, in relation to Iraq I’d suggest reading James Fallows article (previous post) and asking whether anyone thinks the current Administration has the attention span required to follow through on a successful invasion.

Finally, a serious analysis of the options facing the US after a military victory in Iraq from James Fallows. It would be really encouraging to see some indication that the Bush Administration has thought at all beyond the day the Stars and Stripes are raised over Baghdad.

The headline from a thoughtful piece by Hilary McPhee

Paul Krugman shortens the odds on a double-dip recession in the US. While I agree with Krugman on a lot of things, I tend to give more credence to the Schumpeterian idea that in an economy bloated with excess, recession is unavoidable. The obvious imbalance in the US economy is the huge current account deficit, now near 5 per cent of GDP. It’s hard to see how this can be maintained for long, and also hard to see how it can be reduced without a recession. Of course, this is relevant to other chronic deficit countries like Australia.

The NYT gives the full Text of Bush’s Iraq Proposal . The key clause
“The president is authorized to use all means that he determines to be appropriate, including force, in order to enforce the United Nations Security Council resolutions referenced above, defend the national security interests of the United States against the threat posed by Iraq, and restore international peace and security in the region.”
It would be interesting to see some of our experts in textual analysis analyze what limits, if any, this places on Bush’s power to make war anywhere in the Middle East for any reason.

According to theWashington Post the US government has decided that inspections to detect germ warfare programs aren’t a good idea.

Glenn says:

Well, you’re talking about equipment for *making* bombs, and Wright’s talking about the bombs themselves.

My reply:

I’m not saying that the 1991 experience *proves* that inspections will work and that anything found will be destroyed. But it’s silly to discuss hypotheticals without reference to relevant historical experience, and in a way that implicitly assumes that the relevant historical events didn’t happen.

In any case, no-one I’ve seen is claiming that Saddam has anything more than equipment at this stage. The whole case for immediate invasion is that we need to stop him before he gets a bomb.

I’ve always wondered why the warbloggers among us are so convinced that inspections can’t possibly work, given their successes in the past. In some cases, it’s clear that they just want a pretext for invasion, but in others they simply appear to have forgotten.

For example, Glenn Reynolds links to Oz warblogger Paul Wright who asks what happens if the weapons inspectors, by some miracle, actually find something? Reynolds continues “His rather chilling answer suggests that either (1) the powers-that-be have no real expectation that this will come to pass; or (2) they haven’t thought about this hard enough. I’m guessing it’s (1).”James Lileks goes over much the same hypothetical ground

These would be fascinating hypotheses to kick around, if it weren’t for the fact that it’s already happened

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. As Michael O’Hanlon of Slate notes, inspections are the only reason Saddam doesn’t already have the bomb:

“As is well known, Iraq was disturbingly close – perhaps only months away – from building a nuclear weapon at the time of Desert Storm. After Israel bombed its Osirak nuclear reactor a decade earlier, Iraq had embarked on a program to develop less visible technologies for enriching uranium from domestic and possibly foreign sources?its “basement bomb” project. In numerous ways, this effort resembled the difficult and tedious approach taken in the 1940s during the Manhattan Project in the United States, particularly the effort to build uranium-235 devices such as the one dropped on Hiroshima. U.N. inspectors found and destroyed most of the equipment believed to have been involved in Iraq’s effort before the Gulf War of 1991.”

To restate the obvious, inspections will only work with free and unfettered access, and it’s up to the Security Council to ensure this.

Yet another commenting failure. I’m pretty much resigned to moving on from Haloscan. Please send any suggestions by email. For those who don’t feel like typing an address, visit my website (behind a firewall and apparently safe from spiders) and click on the link there.

I haven’t checked Scott Wickstein’s blog for a week or so, since he announced a hiatus, due to pressures of “work, family and having a life”. But he’s obviously found it easier to “delegate some responsibilities” than to kick the blogging habit. When I checked back, I found a very well-thought out response to my post on Pinochet and Brezhnev.